Many ghosts have a perfect craze for announcing that bodies or treasures, are buried where there is nothing of the sort.  Glanvill has a tale of a ghost who accused himself of a murder, and led a man to a place in a wood where the corpse of the slain was to be found.  There was no corpse, the ghost was mad.  The Psychical Society have published the narratives of a housemaid and a butler who saw a lady ghost.  She, later, communicated through a table her intention to appear at eleven p.m.  The butler and two ladies saw her, the gentlemen present did not.  The ghost insisted that jewels were buried in the cellar; the butler dug, but found none.  The writer is acquainted with another ghost, not published, who labours under morbid delusions.  For reasons wholly unfounded on fact she gave a great deal of trouble to a positive stranger.  Now there was literally no sense in these proceedings.  Such is ghostly evidence, ever deceitful!

‘It’s not good,’ says Mr. Law, ’to come in communing terms with Satan, there is a snare in the end of it;’ yet people have actually been hanged, in England, on the evidence of a ghost!  On the evidence of the devil, some other persons were accused of theft, in 1682.  This is a remarkable instance; we often hear of raising the ghostly foe, but we are seldom told how it can be done.  This is how it was done in February, 1682, at the house of the Hon. Robert Montgomery, in Irvine.  Some objects of silver plate were stolen, a maid was suspected, she said ’she would raise the devil, but she would know who the thief was’.  Taking, therefore, a Bible, she went into a cellar, where she drew a circle round her, and turned a sieve on end twice, from right to left.  In her hand she held nine feathers from the tail of a black cock.  She next read Psalm li. forwards, and then backwards Revelations ix. 19.  ‘He’ then appeared, dressed as a sailor with a blue cap.  At each question she threw three feathers at him:  finally he showed as a black man with a long tail.  Meanwhile all the dogs in Irvine were barking, as in Greece when Hecate stood by the cross-ways.  The maid now came and told Mrs. Montgomery (on information received) that the stolen plate was in the box of a certain servant, where, of course, she had probably placed it herself.  However the raiser of the devil was imprisoned for the spiritual offence.  She had learned the rite ’at Dr. Colvin’s house in Ireland, who used to practise this’.

The experiment may easily be repeated by the scientific.

Though Mr. Law is strong in witches and magic, he has very few ghost stories; indeed, according to his philosophy, even a common wraith of a living person is really the devil in that disguise.  The learned Mr. Wodrow, too, for all his extreme pains, cannot be called a very successful amateur of spectres.  A mighty ghost hunter was the Rev. Robert Wodrow of Eastwood, in Renfrewshire, the learned historian of the sufferings of the Kirk of Scotland (1679-1734).